Research in this area started to gain momentum in 2005 after the publication of A.-L. Barabási's seminal paper The origin of bursts and heavy tails in human dynamics.
[1] that introduced a queuing model that was alleged to be capable of explaining the long tailed distribution of inter event times that naturally occur in human activity.
This paper spurred a burst of activity in this new area leading to not only further theoretical development of the Barabasi model,[2][3][4][5] its experimental verification in several different activities [5][6] and the beginning of interest in using proxy tools, such as web server logs.,[7][8][9] cell phone records[10][11] and even the rate at which registration to a major international conference occurs[12] and the distance and rate people around the globe commute from home to work.
[13] In recent years there has been a growing appetite for access to new data sources[14] that might prove useful in quantifying and understanding human behavior both at the individual and collective scales.
[16] It is a study of the ways in which we process information related to the balance of Physical, Emotional, and Mental components of our experiences.